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In a ruling that portends changes to how companies communicate with investors, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday that postings on sites such as Facebook FB +1.17% and Twitter are just as good as news releases and company websites as long as the companies have told investors which outlets they intend to use.

“An increasing number of public companies are using social media to communicate with their shareholders and the investing public,” the SEC said in its report Tuesday. “We appreciate the value and prevalence of social media channels in contemporary market communications, and the commission supports companies seeking new ways to communicate.”

The fair-disclosure rule at issue requires companies to disseminate information in a way that wouldn’t be expected to give an advantage to one group of investors over another. The SEC has said that filing a form, known as an 8-K, or holding an earnings call are both ways to ensure compliance with the regulation.

In 2008, the SEC said that companies could use their corporate home pages, under certain circumstances, to disseminate sensitive information.

                        

In its Tuesday ruling, the agency said social-media sites would also suffice—in some circumstances. It blessed sites as long as companies make clear to investors they plan to use them. It also suggested a corporate executive’s personal Facebook page wasn’t as likely as a company’s social-media page to be a channel through which companies would be allowed to make important announcements.

Joseph Grundfest, a former member of the commission who now teaches at Stanford Law School, said the SEC is bowing to reality in blessing social media. Twitter, where users can post comments of 140 characters or less, says more than 200 million people world-wide use the service at least once a month. Facebook says it has more than one billion users.

As if to buttress the point, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. GS +0.49% tweeted “thanks” to the SEC in response to Tuesday’s guidance.

The SEC’s move comes amid a broader debate over how Washington oversees companies’ interactions with social media as regulators incorporate into their thinking the growing use of websites like Facebook and Twitter by companies and employees.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission are stepping up scrutiny of debt collectors, which have used Facebook to contact debtors. Last month, the FTC said celebrities using social media to endorse products must say so—as they would in traditional advertising venues—if they are paid for the promotion.

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